


Chasing The Count of Saint-Germain

by tigrrmilk



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: M/M, featuring some small nile cameos too, or: why they are not good spies, sometimes immortality is a hard secret to keep
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-10
Updated: 2021-03-10
Packaged: 2021-03-16 13:34:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,609
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29950728
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tigrrmilk/pseuds/tigrrmilk
Summary: Joe keeps his voice low. “In the moment,” he says, “I forgot how long it had been. We met last with the Countess von Gergy decades ago. Do you remember?”“1711, Venice. You were working on a series of drawings of gondoliers, constantly smearing your face with charcoal. You spent much of your time riding in canal boats, dressed in your finest clothes, despite the summer heat. The Dutch ambassador tried to curry your favour by sending two of them to your rooms with very little on. His assumptions were half-right.”The Count of Saint-Germain is charming, mysterious, and the French nobles insist that he does not age. He appears the same at the end of the Sun King's reign as he had near the beginning of it. Nobody knows where he begins, or where he ends. Some say that he has two faces: sometimes his eyes are dark, and sometimes they are not.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 5
Kudos: 126





	Chasing The Count of Saint-Germain

**Author's Note:**

> i have taken some extreme liberties with the actual story of the count of saint-germain here, but in my defence: when you try to casually research this guy everything is just very entertaining nonsense. 
> 
> the count of saint-germain was a man who travelled around much of europe in the 18th century who supposedly never aged, and he liked to talk about how he had lived for hundreds of years. he claimed to have known christ. he had an attendant who once said in front of others that he had been with the count for 500 years.
> 
> so in the spirit of entertaining nonsense about this man: here is a fic about joe and nicky making the error of letting the french nobility know about immortality.

> And you, friend, here beside me,  
>  enjoy this time, for there are delights  
>  in this paradise not to be found  
>  in the eternal one.  
>  **\-- from 'The Valley of Almeria', Ibn Safr al-Marīnī, tr. Cola Franzen**

“She recognised you,” Nico says, quietly, as he brushes dust from the shoulder of Joe’s jacket. His eyes are hooded. The long hallway is not empty, but it is quiet, and there is a faint smell of mould in the air. Joe knew this was a bad idea. He knew he should have played attendant for Nico today, and not the other way around. He swirls his crystal wine glass under the chandelier and watches as a fine spray of bubbles rises to the surface.

These aristocrats never remember the faces of the servants they have seen before. But the charming, unmarried aristocratic men—

“Yes,” Joe says. “I couldn’t see her face, but I knew her voice… I told her I was the same man. That I remembered her too. I mentioned the afternoon we played the piano for her. She thought, still thinks, that I had the difficult part, but really I was just keeping you company.”

Nico brushes his other shoulder, lets his hand linger for slightly too long, and then takes a small step back. Joe wants to bury his face in the space between his neck and shoulder and breathe in the clean smell of him, so different to the heavily perfumed air here.

But of course, they can’t act or speak as they want. Life among the French aristocracy is fertile ground for sublimation. Desires twist and shape themselves into opulence; what is elsewhere simple and good becomes complicated, taken for corruption. They are always being watched, and found to be curious. Worth watching some more. And so, just like anywhere else public these days, Joe cannot kiss Nico, cannot be intimate with him on equal footing. He also cannot remove this wig, which he hates. He straightens his shoulders, and tilts the wine glass so light shatters through the carvings on the outer cup, the glass blown expertly into the shape of a tulip in full bloom.

“Very good, Monsieur,” Nico says, his voice smooth and loud enough that anyone trying to listen in will hear him. His face is shuttered, so still, even viewed through the sparkling wine. Joe can read him anyway. He thinks this was a bad idea too. But they can’t leave. They are here to reach the finance minister, who has not yet arrived at the gathering.

Joe keeps his voice low. “In the moment,” he says, “I forgot how long it had been. We met last with the Countess von Gergy decades ago. Do you remember?”

“1711, Venice. You were working on a series of drawings of gondoliers, constantly smearing your face with charcoal. You spent much of your time riding in canal boats, dressed in your finest clothes, despite the summer heat. The Dutch ambassador tried to curry your favour by sending two of them to your rooms with very little on. His assumptions were half-right.”

Nico’s tone is dry, as if he’s reading off the menu for dinner tonight. He doesn’t mention that Nico himself had been acting as Joe’s gondolier for much of the trip. Joe remembers it with startling immediacy. The wind in Nico’s hair as they passed beneath a bridge that was younger than they were.

“1711,” Joe says, hushed, in wonder. “She told me I must be one hundred years old. She called me a demon.”

“Ah,” Nico says. “That explains why you left the room in such a flurry of discourtesy.”

Joe looks at him sidelong. “Don’t be impertinent,” he says, wanting to be overheard. He’s considering matters before he returns to the room to play a hand of cards. He is not good at the game, but Andromache has taught him a few tricks that he hopes will prolong his evening.

“The gossip is that the Controller-General of Finances has lately taken an interest in matters of alchemy and the occult,” Nico says. “Perhaps he has not come to the party because he doesn’t realise it will be worth his time. But I am sure he will hear of what you say.”

“You are full of many bad ideas,” Joe says, but his brain dances around Nico's words, drinks them in, and starts to form a plan. “I’ll take my wine back now.”

Nico takes a sip and hands it back to Joe. “It’s gone flat,” he says. “You’ll want another one.”

Joe surreptitiously pours the rest of his glass of wine into a magnificent plant pot that decorates the hallway, a lush flower blooming above his head. “Try not to kill anything,” Nico says.

Joe walks back into the room. He rubs a finger over the rim of his glass, and starts to slowly move back in the direction of an elderly French woman he once charmed with music and conversation in Venice, a beautiful city, so many many summers ago, when she was young.

Nico remains, as always in this company, a step behind.

—

“Wait, hold up, put on the brakes,” Nile says. She waves a hand at them. “You’re telling me you just, like, told all the French aristocrats you were immortal. And Andy was fine with that.”

“Andy was off having a French adventure of her own,” Andy says, into her own glass of wine. “I’m not their keeper.”

“It was a mistake,” Joe says. “I made the best of it.”

“I think he was too good at it,” Nicky says, rueful. “He’d wanted me to be the Count for this particular trip, take the eyes off him for a while. But he fitted the fine clothes better, and we didn’t have time to waste asking a tailor to make adjustments. And then they spent decades chasing after him, as if he was more than a story.”

Joe remembers the black silk clothing, the jewels he wore on his shoes for a few weeks before he handed them over in the dead of night to the leadership committee of a peasants’ army. They had been beautiful, but not as beautiful as the taste of the bread Nicky would bake at night, after an evening spent avoiding whatever delicacy their host was trying to convince him to try.

“Hundreds of years earlier, people who discovered us really did think we were devils,” Nicky says. “But times were changing. And Joe was _very_ ridiculous, and as beautiful as he is now.“

Joe grins at him, a soft crinkle in the corners of his eyes. “My heart, I am still not sure it wasn’t all your fault,” he says. “They were chasing you as much as they were me.”

“I thought it was too ridiculous,” Nicky says, finally allowing laughter to spread across his face. Joe will never tire of that smile, the way his mouth goes crooked on the left side when he really means it. “I thought we would become the laughing stock of Versailles, and Paris. But I thought we might at least find something out first. Even if we couldn’t actually get the price of grain to drop.”

“But after that month we spent in Paris and then at the court in Versailles... we kept being spotted,” Joe says. “It was like the whole of Europe and Asia knew who I — who Nicky — was. And they were wrong.”

—

Nicolò is not thinking when he re-uses the name in London, scarcely fifteen years after that evening in Paris, and only two years after Joe has last been stopped by a stranger who wants to know if he is the Count de Saint-Germain he has heard so much about. For all they know, there were still caricatures of him circulating in private journals; for all they know, every doorway contains a French aristocrat waiting, ready to accost Joe, and ask after his alchemical experiments.

He is not thinking, or maybe there is too much to think about. This life is so long, and unexpected. And somehow, this afternoon, when he needs to find a way to meet with one particular diplomat, he has no time to spare.

He is alone, and dressed well, although sparely. Joe is needed elsewhere, and will join him in a weeks’ time. He does not have a week. So Nico takes a deep breath before he speaks, softening his accent so it will not be so easy to pin down. “The Count de Saint-Germain requests an audience,” he said, with a slight bow to the servant who answers the door. “I bring important news from Versailles.”

There is no news, just a shaky forgery. All he wants is to prevent more news from being made, more furious missives being sent. More deaths on the battlefield. Damn these diplomats, and the kings, and the absolute power they serve.

Three weeks later, their attempts to change the tide of history have collapsed only a few hours before, and Nico is playing the harpsichord for a small audience that includes some minor diplomats, their wives, and Handel’s niece Johanna. Joe stands at the back of the room, mouthing the words of the poem this piece had been originally composed for. Nico only stumbles as he plays once.

The war, somewhere that is not inside this room, is still raging. Nico can’t stand to think of it; of how close they had been.

“I am not sure how we made it here,” Nicolò murmurs, a half hour later, as he and Joe stand against the wall of the room and watch as a few couples dance to a young woman playing the harp. “Let’s leave tomorrow. Unless you have any better ideas, I was thinking of brushing up on my battlefield medic training with some practical work.”

“An older woman asked me if I had travelled with you long,” Joe says. There is quiet laughter in his voice, even as he and Nico can see their hard work has come to nothing. He curls a hand round Nico’s hip for a second, then pulls back. “She says it’s very strange; she is not sure she has seen your face before, although she has spent much time in Paris. But she could have sworn the Count, the one time she saw him across a room, had the same eyes as me.”

“You have travelled with me for more than five hundred years,” Nico says. “A very perceptive question. Tonight, I think it’s time to plan our next trip.”

They plan their trip in Nicolò’s borrowed bedchamber, Nico sprawled across Joe’s chest. With one hand he pins Joe’s right arm above his head; with the other, he slowly draws their trail across the map of Joe’s body.

“Here is where we will find the action again,” Nico says, and kisses the skin of Joe’s chest, noses at the curls of hair there, so sweetly.

“One day I will die in your arms,” Joe says, “if you insist on making my heart ache so.”

“Never again,” Nico says, face so serious that Joe can’t help but laugh at him. “Yusuf, my love. It would end me.”

“At least then everybody would know that Saint-Germain was nothing more than a fraud,” Joe says, and he yelps when Nico takes his earlobe between his teeth.

—

Nico is starting to suspect that he’s not a born diplomat. He is fleeing Vienna in the dead of night under yet another assumed name, and Joe is fleeing in the opposite direction, and they will be apart for two weeks if they’re lucky, months if not.

He pays the owner of the cottage he stays in, not so far from Genova, good money to send a letter to her cousin in town mentioning that her recent guest, the so-called Count de Saint-Germain, has died in his sleep.

 _Funny_ , she writes to her cousin, on Nico’s dictation. _In the end he looked so old and tired. He says he sold all his instruments and jewellery in Vienna. I’m not sure he ever had anything at all._

“I can keep my secrets,” the woman says, when Nico promises her more money in six months if she does not tell anyone what he has done, of his hoax. She nods to him as he takes his leave, and later that afternoon she finds his finest clothes tucked into her wardrobe. Black silk, still as soft under her fingers as if it were new. There is a note pinned to the collar, with a fine silver pin. It simply reads: _I do not require this any longer. Do with it as you will._

—

“Okay,” Nile says, the next morning. “I was googling around and there are stories about this guy talking about how he knew Jesus, and _then_ there are stories about someone matching his general description turning up in Paris a hundred years later and basically just fucking with a cafe full of people while he drank his coffee.”

“He didn’t even use the name, that one’s not fair.” Nicky pushes a plate of buttered triangles of toast across the table to her. “He was just going through a phase where he liked to tell people about immortality, to see how they’d take it. Usually they thought he was drunk or mad.”

“Booker?”

“Booker,” Nicky agrees.

Joe yawns into his coffee. “But the stories about the count’s life before we were born — a lot of that’s just totally invented, some French people got bored one day. I think some of it’s Andy, although I’ve never heard the stories from her. She guards her secrets. Maybe you’ll have better luck.”

—

Honestly, Andy doesn’t really remember using the name, although it doesn’t mean she never did. But when she hears the stories, she suspects some of her more candid moments under different names have been threaded into this odd tapestry of occult bullshit, embellishments, and the odd unexpected fact.

“I was in Russia,” she says. “There was a revolution. Not the one you’re thinking of. Earlier. I thought he was going to die. He thought he was going to die. We were trapped. I talked to him. Talking sometimes helps.”

“Yeah,” Nile says. “I’m sure. So you talked to him about the whole, not-dying situation?”

Andy stretches, then shrugs. “I thought he’d just think it was a metaphor for heaven. They usually do.”

“He didn’t,” Joe says. He was supposed to be sparring with Nicky, but after a particularly gruelling fight that ended in a stalemate they’re exhausted, lying on the ground next to each other, staring up at the sky. “And of course, he didn’t die.”

“Funny to think,” Nicky says, in the same matter-of-fact tone. Nile is starting to notice how sometimes they talk like one brain is stringing together their thoughts. “When we first died and came back I thought this must be hell. I would never know how to explain it to someone and make it sound different.”

“You don’t still think it’s hell,” Nile says. It’s not a question. She knows Nicky.

“I realised after a while that this was a gift,” Nicky says. “Whether it’s heaven or not, I can’t say. It’s enough for me.”

Joe rolls onto his side and looks at him with gleaming eyes. Nicky continues to stare upwards, but now there is more colour in his cheeks. “You’re unbearable,” Joe says, a big smile on his face. His eyebrows are performing somersaults of joy. “If this isn’t heaven, what is?”

“Nothing else could be,” Nicky says, and hooks an elbow around his shoulders to pull him in for a kiss. “Nothing else but this.”

**Author's Note:**

> you can find me on tumblr at [alwaysalreadyangry](https://alwaysalreadyangry.tumblr.com/)!


End file.
